Prot and haste cap, pls help

I keep reading that we want 50% to be haste capped and I was simply wondering are we looking at 50% melee haste or spell haste? Currently my melee haste is 24.40% and my spell haste reads 36.84%. my ilvl is 522 and I was just wondering which of the two should i pay attention to?

He slipped out of his royal garments, left eternity to enter time, divinity to wrap himself in humanity.
The sea of glass, for the ocean of separation. He left peace, and for the first time felt pain.
Because the very hands that held the stars were now sentenced to wear my scars.

Its 50% spell haste and it is for the sacred shield, and you get it at around 12800 haste. 50% melee haste is not obtainable at this current gear level, as you need ~21,5k haste.

I think you misunderstood how haste works for paladins and why we want it.

21250 is obtainable in T15 gear btw.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

There is just to many variables in any given boss fight to simply make a tanking sim for it. Personally I will wait and see how the boss fights are designed than make a personal decision on every boss fight what is better and what is worse. There is no one answer that is correct. Some stats are better on some fights, some on others.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

There is just to many variables in any given boss fight to simply make a tanking sim for it. Personally I will wait and see how the boss fights are designed than make a personal decision on every boss fight what is better and what is worse. There is no one answer that is correct. Some stats are better on some fights, some on others.

The point of the sims is not that the boss that is hitting you is representative of an actual boss. The metric used looks exclusively at every window of 4 consecutive attacks in the sim. Looking at (almost) any given 6 second window in a boss fight will be identical to what is happening constantly in the sim: 4 boss melee swings and some small (magic) raid damage. There are notable exceptions to this, but as you've made the point of many times, those exceptions are always known in advance and planned for on a case-by-case basis. So what we are looking at is the behavior seen during small windows of time during those interim periods between boss abilities. 6 seconds is a reasonable window of time for a healer to see the tank taking large hits and react with a targeted heal, therefore we look to surviving spikes that would cause us to die faster than that. Looking at those situations is where the TMI metric excels and where the sims become useful.

These 6 second windows are the same reason that the tanking cloak proc is such an immensely powerful effect in a 25H (or later 10H) setting. It explicitly eliminates the possibility of a sudden tank death in a high-melee damage environment because of the rarity of those damage spikes. It shares the same benefit that Stamina does in preventing deaths, except that the cloak proc is equivalent to an infinite health pool at the time of the proc.

I am not saying Sims is useless, but they are not a gospel. Especially if you only consider melee hits.

The 6 second window logic is flawed for a few reasons.

1. The fact that almost not a single boss is following the 1.5s swing timer rule.

2. If a boss does nothing but auto hit me for 6 seconds, I really dont give a shit about what stats I got since I will survive either way. Other than that I would also like to see the boss that does this.

3. The only 6 second windows that I care about is when it is some large external damage going out. Say for abilities like Talon Rake or whatever. I care about the 3 seconds before and the 3 seconds after the rake, nothing else. In this case using a metric that judges only melee swings is also irrelevant since the major factor here was the talon rake.

This is one of the reasons that mastery is a stat that is highly undervalued. Since you have these predictable periods of 6 seconds where the damage in-take actually matters. In this tier, often this was coupled with a huge melee damage attack.

Let put this to the extreme, imagine a boss that only does 2 things on you, first off regular melee hits, every 10th melee hit he goes into a mega enrage ala Sha of Fear and hits for 9x his normal amount. Lets say you are able to keep 50% SotR uptime. This means you can cover 5 of those 10 melee hits in each cycle of mega enrage attack of doom. Naturally you are gonna keep SotR up for the mega attack. Though what is important on this boss fight, is that the only damage you actually care about is the attack before the mega attack, the mega attack, and the attack after. Naturally you are gonna bank up 6 HoPo before this so you can use back to back SotR to get full coverage. What this means is that you have 100% SotR uptime in the only 6 second window that you actually care about. The only thing gaining more haste or expertise (lets say you are below exp hard cap) is gonna gain you, is more coverage on the attacks that you dont give a shit about. You still got full coverage when you want it.

You could also look at it since the mega attack hits like 9 attacks, each 10 attack cycle is actually closer to 18 attacks, and with your 50% uptime, you are managing to cover 13 of those 18 'attacks'. Getting any more HoPo regen is not gonna help you any more on that mega attack as you already got it covered, which means that the value of HoPo regen becomes heavily deflated. So while you only have 50% SotR uptime you are covering 72% of the damage and 100% of the dangerous damage.

Mastery is far superior to stamina when it comes to effective damage as long as SotR is up, since we already established that in this example, you had 100% uptime on the dangerous damage, mastery is far superior to stamina in these cases.

Now this is of course an extreme example, but it can be applied in some fashions to most of the fights in T15.
Horridon has his punctures and dire calls
Tortos his snapping bites
Ji-Kun the rake
Durumu stare
Dark Animus has the adds in the beginning where you have almost 100% sotr uptime when linking them together
IQ has the final phase where you have 100% uptime when the dogs are up
LS has the decapitate and the period after that

Now there are of course other situations, like talking about fights like Council where the only dangerous part is the frigid assault adds completely different dynamics to a fight. This is why there is no "easy" answer, each fight is unique. The best we can do is make an overlook over the fights and see what is superior in most cases.

Still, all this being said, survivability, especially in 10 man is not even an issue to begin with, this makes all this irrelevant and haste the superior stat simply because it adds the most dps.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

I just grabbed a few, but notable exceptions include Horridon (2 seconds between swings), Frost King Malakk, and Lei Shen (swing twice as fast)

Originally Posted by Firefly33

2. If a boss does nothing but auto hit me for 6 seconds, I really dont give a shit about what stats I got since I will survive either way. Other than that I would also like to see the boss that does this.

You will survive, yes, with greatly increased attention required from your healers to ensure that you don't die. The primary purpose of smoothing out damage intake is so that the majority of tank healing can be covered with passive healing (lifebloom, beacon, AoE heals, atonement, etc.). Increasing the presence of damage spikes requires more attention from healers and increased usage of cast-time heals on the tank, time which could be better used elsewhere. On the note of bosses that do that, all of the bosses I linked above were windows of 6+ seconds of straight auto attack damage (with other raid damage, but I excluded that for the sake of readability).

Originally Posted by Firefly33

3. The only 6 second windows that I care about is when it is some large external damage going out. Say for abilities like Talon Rake or whatever. I care about the 3 seconds before and the 3 seconds after the rake, nothing else. In this case using a metric that judges only melee swings is also irrelevant since the major factor here was the talon rake.

This just lends itself to my original point, that windows of time which don't conform to a patchwerk-style scenario of boss melee+raid damage are the ones that we look and plan for. They will be adequately covered regardless of gearing, and are therefore largely irrelevant to the discussion of gearing.

I will concede this point, increasing the proportion of damage that comes from magic damage increases the value of haste dramatically while decreasing the value of other stats, however acknowledging that tendency just means that the educated player will adjust for it when making final decisions.

Originally Posted by Firefly33

This is one of the reasons that mastery is a stat that is highly undervalued. Since you have these predictable periods of 6 seconds where the damage in-take actually matters. In this tier, often this was coupled with a huge melee damage attack.

I will also concede that mastery is undervalued by the outlook, however I would argue that it is not by as much as you state. Predictable periods of high damage intake are already survivable with mastery we gain innately from gear. While increasing mastery does increase the damage reduction during those periods of high damage and increase survivability some, it is diminished by the fact that those periods would have been survivable anyway due to the simple fact that they are known and can be planned for.

Originally Posted by Firefly33

Let put this to the extreme, imagine a boss that only does 2 things on you, first off regular melee hits, every 10th melee hit he goes into a mega enrage ala Sha of Fear and hits for 9x his normal amount. Lets say you are able to keep 50% SotR uptime. This means you can cover 5 of those 10 melee hits in each cycle of mega enrage attack of doom. Naturally you are gonna keep SotR up for the mega attack. Though what is important on this boss fight, is that the only damage you actually care about is the attack before the mega attack, the mega attack, and the attack after. Naturally you are gonna bank up 6 HoPo before this so you can use back to back SotR to get full coverage. What this means is that you have 100% SotR uptime in the only 6 second window that you actually care about. The only thing gaining more haste or expertise (lets say you are below exp hard cap) is gonna gain you, is more coverage on the attacks that you dont give a shit about. You still got full coverage when you want it.

You could also look at it since the mega attack hits like 9 attacks, each 10 attack cycle is actually closer to 18 attacks, and with your 50% uptime, you are managing to cover 13 of those 18 'attacks'. Getting any more HoPo regen is not gonna help you any more on that mega attack as you already got it covered, which means that the value of HoPo regen becomes heavily deflated. So while you only have 50% SotR uptime you are covering 72% of the damage and 100% of the dangerous damage.

We can also look to the opposite extreme in a fight that is similar to Ra-den p2, with consistently high melee damage coupled with high raid damage. In this situation, a randomly occuring spike caused by not avoiding/absorbing a few melee swings in a row is absolutely fatal. In this situation gaining increased haste and expertise allows for more reactive play. In the situation that a boss melees for 50% of your health per swing and you heal for 10% per second, you need to ensure that no string of 4 attacks exceeds 160% of your health. Dodge/parry/block can help with this but cannot be relied on to ensure that death would be avoided. Similarly increasing mastery helps some, but less so than does mitigating more attacks with slightly lower mitigation. If you were to add in a mechanic that is a guaranteed one-shot if not mitigated (a-la Ra-den p1), then controlling your mitigation to both cover that mechanic and ensure that no string of melee attacks exceeds your maximum health is going to skyrocket the values of haste and expertise relative to mastery/dodge/parry.

Originally Posted by Firefly33

Mastery is far superior to stamina when it comes to effective damage as long as SotR is up, since we already established that in this example, you had 100% uptime on the dangerous damage, mastery is far superior to stamina in these cases.

In those situations when you can guarantee SotR for a spike in damage, yes mastery will be superior to stamina, which is why the interaction between haste and mastery is so important. However without 100% uptime on SotR you *cannot* guarantee that you will have SotR for every spike in damage (this is by definition, as having SotR up for the spike would prevent the spike in the first place) which is where the passive increase in survivability gained from stamina becomes valuable

Originally Posted by Firefly33

Now this is of course an extreme example, but it can be applied in some fashions to most of the fights in T15.
Horridon has his punctures and dire calls
Tortos his snapping bites
Ji-Kun the rake
Durumu stare
Dark Animus has the adds in the beginning where you have almost 100% sotr uptime when linking them together
IQ has the final phase where you have 100% uptime when the dogs are up
LS has the decapitate and the period after that

Again, though, those points are at known times and planned for extensively. Those will be covered regardless of your gearing choice provided you are playing at an appropriate level, so they are largely irrelevant to discussions of gear, except to note that mastery is slightly undervalued when looking only at small windows of time.

Originally Posted by Firefly33

Now there are of course other situations, like talking about fights like Council where the only dangerous part is the frigid assault adds completely different dynamics to a fight. This is why there is no "easy" answer, each fight is unique. The best we can do is make an overlook over the fights and see what is superior in most cases.

Still, all this being said, survivability, especially in 10 man is not even an issue to begin with, this makes all this irrelevant and haste the superior stat simply because it adds the most dps.

On 10 man? No, survivability is not a pressing concern IN THIS TIER, however my hunch is that tank damage in the next tier is going to be balanced with the expectation that you be tanking with the legendary cloak so we can expect to see a very large jump in boss damage.

On 25 man? Survivability is absolutely one of your primary concerns. The increased tank damage relative to tank health pools exacerbates all of the points I made above. Tank deaths are significantly more likely to occur to just boss damage than in a 10 man environment, especially in 25 heroics.

My point in closing is not to say that the sims are gospel, but rather that you greatly understate the value that they bring to the table. The 6-second window model in the current state of the game is looking simply at reducing the prevalence of random spike damage, thereby decreasing the need for directed attention from healers. If 90% of the healing on the tank can be covered with passive healing, then you will see an increase in raid healing throughput as well as a decrease in tank deaths when compared to an environment where only 50% (or less) of tank healing can be covered passively, even in the situation where both tanks have taken the same total damage.

TL;DR: The sims are not gospel, but their value is being greatly understated.

On 10 man? No, survivability is not a pressing concern IN THIS TIER, however my hunch is that tank damage in the next tier is going to be balanced with the expectation that you be tanking with the legendary cloak so we can expect to see a very large jump in boss damage.

On 25 man? Survivability is absolutely one of your primary concerns. The increased tank damage relative to tank health pools exacerbates all of the points I made above. Tank deaths are significantly more likely to occur to just boss damage than in a 10 man environment, especially in 25 heroics.

Ehmm.. not really.
It is true, that bosses on 25 hit 20-25% harder, but with different gearing you can adjust your health pool to it.
Obviously if you don't, then your "TMI" would be worse. But even then we would have to include other differences between the two formats.

And no, it is seriously unlikely that the encounters will be balanced around the cloak-proc.
Simply because:
a) Alts.
b) Balancing a encounter around this kind of a proc is rather hard(/stupid). If it would be a static -dmg% then maybe, but it isn't.

Originally Posted by huth

It's kinda amazing how many hands these guys have, anyway. Our tank pally can put his hands on 3 different people and still hold his weapon and shield and make unsavory gestures towards enemies.

Ehmm.. not really.
It is true, that bosses on 25 hit 20-25% harder, but with different gearing you can adjust your health pool to it.
Obviously if you don't, then your "TMI" would be worse. But even then we would have to include other differences between the two formats.

And no, it is seriously unlikely that the encounters will be balanced around the cloak-proc.
Simply because:
a) Alts.
b) Balancing a encounter around this kind of a proc is rather hard(/stupid). If it would be a static -dmg% then maybe, but it isn't.

Balanced around the cloak was probably the wrong way to phrase it. I more meant that due to the cloaks, damage is likely going to increase faster between bosses/difficulties moreso than in previous tiers. They can reasonably expect at least half of a raid group that is doing heroics would have cloaks, especially those that are doing later heroics, so it seems likely that tank/raid damage and dps requirements are going to be a bit steeper than in previous tiers.

This just lends itself to my original point, that windows of time which don't conform to a patchwerk-style scenario of boss melee+raid damage are the ones that we look and plan for. They will be adequately covered regardless of gearing, and are therefore largely irrelevant to the discussion of gearing.

Umm... but if the only place where you can die is in such scenario. Then:

a) The boss just melee swings you -> You won't die regardless of gearing.
b) The boss uses a nuke which could kill you, but you obviously cover them with AM/CD. -> You won't die regardless of gearing.

Maybe the only exception are extremely hard hitting bosses, like Horridon (after Enrage) and Ra-Den.

Originally Posted by huth

It's kinda amazing how many hands these guys have, anyway. Our tank pally can put his hands on 3 different people and still hold his weapon and shield and make unsavory gestures towards enemies.